Terms

The Service

colors.codes is a free, no-account naming engine and color library: a canvas of every sRGB color, a curated gallery, a palette workspace, an image-picker, and a Chrome extension. The Service is provided as-is and may change, evolve, or be discontinued at any time without notice.

Your license to use the Service

We grant you a worldwide, non-exclusive, revocable, royalty-free license to use the Service for any lawful purpose — personal, educational, or commercial. You don't need to ask permission to use the engine output, share permalinks, or build something on top of colors.codes. Just don't do the things in “Acceptable use” below.

Our content and engine output

Different parts of what the Service produces have different licenses. None of them require you to ask:

• Engine-generated names (procedural names like “Quiet Periwinkle Petal” or “Tangerine Dream”) are deterministic outputs of a function applied to a hex. We dedicate them to the public domain (CC0). Use them in palettes, design tokens, brand work, anywhere.
• Curated names & descriptions (the hand-picked entries with mood, family, and editorial notes) are © colors.codes and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Use them anywhere with credit (“Names from colors.codes” or a link is fine).
• Color values (hex, RGB, HSL, OKLCH) are facts and are not subject to copyright. Use them freely.
• Brand assets (the conic-gradient mark, the “colors.codes” wordmark) are trademarks of colors.codes and are notlicensed under the above. Don't imply endorsement, sponsorship, or affiliation without explicit permission.

Acceptable use

To keep the Service available for everyone:

• Don't scrape the site at hammer rates. If you want bulk access to the curated dataset, please reach out — we're happy to help and a scheduled export is friendlier to the bandwidth than a crawler.
• Don't republish substantial portions of the curated content as your own product without honoring the CC BY 4.0 attribution.
• Don't attempt to disrupt, overload, or circumvent the security of the Service or its hosting infrastructure.
• Don't impersonate colors.codes or imply official endorsement of unaffiliated products.
• Don't use the Chrome extension to violate any applicable law or another site's terms — and obviously don't modify it to exfiltrate page content (the unmodified extension does not, and the privacy policy explains exactly what it does access).

We may rate-limit, block, or take down content or access that violates these rules.

The Chrome extension

The colors.codes Chrome extension is distributed via the Chrome Web Store, subject to Google's Chrome Web Store terms of service in addition to these terms. Updates are pushed by the Chrome Web Store. The extension is optional — you do not need it to use any other part of the Service. See the Privacy policy for the data-handling details.

Donations

colors.codes is free and ad-free. If you'd like to support the work, we accept voluntary donations through Buy Me a Coffee. Donations are gifts, not purchases — they don't entitle you to any specific feature, support level, or future development. Buy Me a Coffee handles the payment under their own terms; we never receive or store your card details.

No warranty

The Service is provided as-is and as-available, without warranty of any kind, express or implied — including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement. Specifically:

• Names, mood tags, and editorial descriptions reflect judgment calls — there is no objectively correct name for a hex.
• Hex, RGB, HSL, and OKLCH values are provided for design reference only. Do not rely on them for safety-critical applications (highway-sign colors, medical labeling, electrical-wire color codes, brand-color compliance, etc.) without independent verification against the governing standard.
• We do not guarantee continuous availability, bug-free operation, or backward compatibility of any URL, output format, or API.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, colors.codes, its operators, and contributors will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages — including lost profits, lost data, or business interruption — arising out of or related to your use of the Service, even if we've been advised of the possibility. Our total cumulative liability for any claim related to the Service will not exceed the greater of (a) the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, which for a free service is $0, or (b) the minimum amount required by applicable law in your jurisdiction.

Some jurisdictions don't allow the exclusion of certain warranties or limitation of certain damages, so some of the above may not apply to you. You retain any rights you have under applicable consumer-protection law.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. The “Last updated” date above will change, and material changes (introducing accounts, paid tiers, or new categories of data collection) will be flagged on the site before they take effect. Continued use of the Service after a change means you accept the updated terms.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Germany, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) and German conflict-of-law rules. Where you are a consumer (Verbraucher) under German or EU law, this choice of law does not deprive you of the mandatory protections afforded by the law of the country in which you have your habitual residence (Article 6 of the Rome I Regulation).

For non-consumers, the exclusive place of jurisdiction for any dispute arising from or related to these terms or the Service is Itzehoe, Germany. For consumers, the statutory rules of jurisdiction under § 12 et seq. ZPO apply, meaning you may bring a claim in the courts where you reside.

Contact

Questions about these terms, licensing requests, or bulk-data access: hello@colors.codes.